Information and the Beauty Premium in Political Elections

Abstract

We use data on 800 candidates from the 2012 U.S. election cycle in U.S. and state congressional races to examine the degree to which beauty affects electoral outcomes. We find that a candidate that is one standard deviation more beautiful receives a 1.1 percentage point higher vote share and is 6.0 percentage points more likely to win the election. This beauty premium is larger in situations where voters are less likely to have more information about the candidate. The beauty premium is much smaller for U.S. congressional races than for state congressional races, and is also much smaller for incumbent candidates. In addition, we find a correlation that the beauty premium is lower when a candidate spends more money on the election. (JEL D72, J70)

Role effect on beauty premium: Female as proposer may gain more fairness

“…Beauty premium is the outcome of an innate human behavior bias that is not reasonable and fair in labor market and economic decision making (Maestripieri et al, 2017), while to date, few studies have contributed to weakening or eliminating this human behavior bias. It seems quite important to investigate and then give implication to reduce the unfair distributions and suboptimal outcomes caused by beauty premium (Jones & Price, 2017). Researchers have proposed that providing information about counterparts' personal wealth, social status, and individual characteristics may alleviate the beauty premium in social interactions (Jones & Price, 2017; Maestripieri et al, 2017; Riggle et al, 1992), because people usually tend to make judgments only based on their counterparts' appearance and actions in many cases where personal characteristic information is unknown (Conlon et al, 2012).…”

“…It seems quite important to investigate and then give implication to reduce the unfair distributions and suboptimal outcomes caused by beauty premium (Jones & Price, 2017). Researchers have proposed that providing information about counterparts' personal wealth, social status, and individual characteristics may alleviate the beauty premium in social interactions (Jones & Price, 2017; Maestripieri et al, 2017; Riggle et al, 1992), because people usually tend to make judgments only based on their counterparts' appearance and actions in many cases where personal characteristic information is unknown (Conlon et al, 2012). For example, Riggle et al (1992) proposed that candidates' attractiveness influences voters' choices significantly in the absence of all other information.…”